The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

Monday, May 23, 2016

Mindanao, Duterte, and the Real History of the Philippines

"US is responsible for at least a quarter of a million conflict deaths in the Philippines while the PRC has accounted for ze..." "Hey, look at that ship over there!"

The U.S. government and the Manila elite are pretty interested in hyping the naval confrontation with the PRC, while going all "bygones" on the bloody, corrupting, ongoing, and (for some elite Filipinos empowering and enriching) U.S. deep penetration of the Philippines' political and security regimes.

Duterte upsets this script, because his political career has been spent on Mindanao and he's been exposed to the pointy, crappy end of the U.S. military spear for over a decade.

I wrote about Duterte's direct, unhappy experience with U.S. milsec shenanigans in the matter of bomb-building US spook Michael Meiring at Asia Times.

I also put up a long piece on China Matters that discussed the fact that Meiring is just one of many old and current skeletons ready to come clattering out of the closet if Duterte diverts the political discourse away from "US and Philippines: Shoulder to Shoulder Against China in the SCS!" to an examination of serial U.S. meddling in the Philippines in the name of security, counterinsurgency, and anti-terror over the last 115 years.

Duterte’s an interesting cat. Nicknamed The Punisher, he’s a horndog,
bully, a bruiser, and an enthusiastic vigilante.

The US media seems to
have pigeonholed him as “The Philippines’ Donald Trump with Death Squads,” an
indication of instinctive unease with a populist political force that doesn’t
declare allegiance to the modern liberal playbook—and who condoned death squads
in his city.

He’s also a lawyer, albeit one who shot a fellow student and was therefore
not allowed to march at his graduation.

Duterte won the presidential election despite
the open opposition of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. He
alleges he was abused by a Jesuit priest at school and has a combative
relationship with the Catholic Church, as in "f*ck the Pope" combative.

His local political base is on
Mindanao, which is about 20% Muslim. He was mayor of Davao City, whose population of 1.4 million makes it the biggest city on Mindanao and the fourth-largest in the Philippines.

Mindanao has a lot of history--a lot of bad, bloody, history--involving the United States, history that has shaped Duterte's attitude toward the U.S.

In many ways, Mindanao provides an alternate narrative to the largely Roman Catholic post-colonial elite that dominates Philippines political discourse.

Spanish subjugation of the Philippines involved forced conversion to
Catholicism in a chain of Muslim sultanates that once ran all the way up from
the Straits of Malacca to modern Manila.

Mindanao, under the Sultan of Sulu, proved less tractable.

Much less tractable.

I think the
struggle to reduce Mindanao, first by the Spanish, then by the Americans, and
now by the central government in Manila must rate as the lengthiest
insurrection in world history, spanning 400 years. Resistance often
included a significant Chinese component. I highly recommend the
encyclopedic Wikipedia entry on the Spanish-Moro
conflict to interested readers.

With the American victory in 1898, the Philippines became America's stepping stone to empire (and China; the U.S. presence in the Philippines was seen as a key leverage point for the pivot, excuse me, the "Open Door" policy that would properly integrate China into the family of nations).

And the footprint lay heaviest in Mindanao, which bitterly resisted the United States in the Moro War of 1898-1902 (officially; President Roosevelt declared "Mission Accomplished" in 1902 but unrest and massacre continued well beyond that punctuation point).

Subjugating the Moro was the brutal colonial-racist yin that came with the triumphant yang of superseding Spain as a burgeoning imperial power.

The turn of the 20th Century was the Golden Age of American political cartooning--blatantly racist political cartooning, I might add--and provides a multitude of instructive images of Uncle Sam in the Philippines...

1) as godlike imperator;

2) benevolent savior (here he is rescuing the Philippines from the twin threats of mangy Spanish imperialism and Aguinaldo's revolution, rather unkindly representing the Europeanized Philippine nationalist as a ravening wolf):

3) benevolent colonial patron (in this picture he's demonstrating to the rebels in the Philippines the advantages enjoyed by more tractable Cuba);

4) long-suffering colonial (school) master;

And 5) the cockeyed optimist who got more fight (and less gratitude) than he bargained for.

Sometimes, you get it all at once.

Here, Uncle Sam is presented as laboring under the heaviest white man's burden, the "primitive races", as Great Britain forges ahead on the path to universal human uplift with the lighter load of colonial subjects of the ancient civilizations. The "uncivilized" character of the Philippines was essential to the U.S. colonial narrative, by the way. It enabled the U.S. to brush aside nascent Philippine national organs and concrete national aspirations in order to justify the unilateral imposition of U.S. rule over a "multi-tribal" congeries of "primitive savages".

Okay, that's enough imperial/colonialist/racist bullsh*t.

This whole period of American history merits, I think, its own Foucault to document the queasy, improvised formation of the "modern" consciousness that emerged in the 1890s and 1900s, midwived by technology, mass media, and an effort to process and comfortably pigeonhole the immense horrors people could commit, document,and propagate in the industrial age.

I wrote about this phenomenon in a U.S. domestic context, that of the Guldensuppe case, a rather ordinary crime passionel of 1897 that William Randolph Hearst concocted into a modern sensation, "The Crime of the Century" with the help of steam-powered presses, the bicycle, the telegraph, and the electric chair--and an audience agog at the realization that updates on murder and massacre could be delivered nearly instantaneously into its hands wrapped in the daily paper.

As I wrote at the end of the piece:

Relishing his victory over The World and Joseph Pulitzer in New York City, Hearst quickly
moved on to leverage his talents, ambitions, and media assets on a truly global
stage.

His chosen sensation: the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor in 1898. The objective: war between Spain and the
United States.

The outcome: well, the rest is history. Modern
history.

And modern war, represented by the first U.S. overseas counterinsurgency operation, against the Moro on Mindanao and other islands of the Philippines' Islamic South.

The US Army, initially at sea in an Asian land
and facing an enemy quite different from the professional,
surrender-friendly units it had encountered during the Mexican and Civil
Wars, adapted by bringing in the genocidal, total-war tactics practiced
against the Native Americans inside the continental U.S. and developing
a new set of best practices.

New
ways to kill were needed. Famously, tales of Moro warriors not going down even when shot multiple times by .38 rounds occasioned the adoption of heavier rounds (after a grisly episode of testing on human cadavers and in
the Chicago stockyards to find what would stop and kill consistently even if the head or heart were not struck) and eventually, development of the Colt .45 semi-automatic as the standard military sidearm.

New ideas about killing also emerged.

The Moro rebellion exploded the traditional U.S. idea of warfare, the
roles of soldiers and noncombatants, and what could and should not be
done; and a racial/genocidal narrative arose to replace it with
invincible and startling speed.

Over at Japan Focus, Paul Kramer has a great piece documenting the birth of what one might term homo Americanus imperialisimus, with
flummoxed good ol' boys evolving into professional genocidaires within
weeks of their arrival in "the boondocks". Kramer, by the way,
identifies the evocative wildlands term "boondocks" as the one neologism
coined by the war. I think one should also add "running amok" an
individual ecumenical murder/suicide spree (which, along with the
socially moderated and ritualized martyrdom operation against the U.S. infidels, known as juramentado, appalled and terrified American soldiers) to the list.

The U.S. war in the Philippines flirts with
genocide, especially in the wholesale indiscriminant slaughter ordered or condoned
by some military commanders.

Hundreds
of thousands of Filipinos died during the thirty years it took the U.S.
to crush the resistance. One figure goes as high as 1.4 million over
the thirty-year duration of the conflict--more than Iraq and Syria
combined, at least to date.

In the Philippines, the U.S. media was learning how to report a U.S. imperial action: what to report, how to report it, and what the reader was supposed to feel...

...even as the U.S. Army started to get a grip on the propaganda levers it needed to yank to sell or at least sustain a long, brutal, and not terribly popular overseas war of choice.

The press got involved in one of those new frontier challenges: how the military should go about extracting intelligence from uncooperative detainees.

It turns out that, based on claims of military necessity, by simultaneously stripping detainees of the protections afforded civilian prisoners and military detainees, and through a dose of callous racism, the answer was Torture!

Extracting information became a matter of considerable impatience and few scruples.

Interrogations employed various modes of physical abuse, including an early form of waterboarding called "the water cure". I'm not up on the distinctions, but current waterboarding appears to be a refinement of the traditional technique. Today, the victim is placed on a slanted board and treated with a relatively limited amount of water to simulate drowning while introducing the same response of uncontrollable panic.

In the Philippines, it appears that the victims were simply laid flat and drowned for real by funneling large quantities of water down their throats. When their stomachs bloated from the water, I believe the boot was applied and the drowning sensation reproduced in reverse. Salt water was sometimes used. (There are even worse ways. The KMT secret police under Dai Li used liquefied feces instead of water).

Wikipedia states the U.S. adopted an ongoing Spanish practice in the Philippines,
though it should be said that water torture was practiced inside the
U.S earlier in the 19th century and is, apparently, one of those
near-universal exercises in creating human misery.

The issue of waterboarding in the Philippines introduced a round of public debate, disquiet, and public wristlapping that will be familiar to students of the Guantanamo issue. An American officer was courtmartialed for waterboarding, given a one-month suspended sentence and a $50 fine.

Correspondents in the Philippines witnessed and reported these novel monstrosities.

Life Magazine depicted a session of the water cure applied to a stone-thrower on the cover of its May 22,1902 issue. Despite the realism of the scene, there seems to be some ethical commentary involved. The approving onlookers appear to be representatives of imperial/colonial militaries through history welcoming the U.S. into the fraternity of abusers.

The practice was also photographed:

I get a sense of undiluted reportage here, a relatively unmediated glimpse of America's new imperial order, together with a certain voyeuristic bewilderment: are we supposed to show this behavior? condemn it? excuse it? is it good? is it bad? does it work? should I be doing this?

Eventually, of course, the decision was made to "just hide it" rather than give the American public the opportunity to examine and reflect upon the consequences of U.S. imperial adventures. Today, the CIA destroyed the tapes of waterboarding and interrogation at Guantanamo, "lost" the CIA Inspector General's copy of the Senate torture report, and the US government has gone to court to block photos of ill treatment, abuse, and perhaps torture committed at the Abu Grahib detention facility in Iraq.

But back the 1900s, the Philippine "water cure" had entered the discourse to the extent that a left-wing cartoonist depicted the torture to mock Theodore Roosevelt for torturing the United States into a renunciation of the ideals of the Declaration of Independence in favor of imperialism (symbolized by the "Imps" assisting him. Identifying the imps would be an interesting parlor game. I think the imp in the lower left sitting on Uncle Sam's arm is Chauncey Depew, Cornelius Vanderbilt's attorney, president of the New York Central, andSenator from New York; Nelson Aldrich (Nelson Rockefeller's grandpappy), sitting on the right leg; and maybe Henry Cabot Lodge leaning on the "Roosevelt Platform".).

Note in the upper right corner the American flag has been replaced by a banner declaring "Slavery & Polygamy Protected by Sultan of Sulu Per Roosevelt".

In 1898, the Sultan of Sulu had been commanded to support the U.S. takeover of the Philippines per the instruction of the Ottoman Empire in Istanbul thanks to the diplomatic efforts of U.S. Secretary of State John Hay, thereby making the U.S., in the eyes of the cartoonist, a partner in the sultan's unchristian and undemocratic decadence.

Disquiet about the lengthy, brutal, and distant war entered into media and public attitudes.

One of the most infamous massacres was the so-called "First Battle of Bud Dajo" , better known as the "Moro Crater Massacre" in 1906. US forces pursuing Moro miscreants on Sulu Island cornered them in a community that had sheltered in the crater of the long-dormant Bud Dajo volcano, pulled Navy guns and a machine gun up to the lip of the crater, and blasted away, killing 800 to 1000 men, women, and children. Reportedly only six Moro survived. Fifteen American soldiers died.

The governor of the Moro Province, Major General Leonard Wood, tweeted the battle (actually, sent out a stream of cable dispatches celebrating the operation and the valor of his troops). However, the massacre was also extensively reported by a press corps that was insufficiently house-trained ("embedded" is the correct term, I guess) and excessively ambivalent about the war effort, especially since President Roosevelt had declared an end to the war four years earlier.

Despite excuses that will appear familiar to connoisseurs of military buckpassing today--Moro fighters were disguised as women, collateral damage resulted from men using women and children as human shields, and so on--the massacre was a public relations disaster for the Army.

Mark Twain was incensed at the massacre and wrote an interesting account of how the reports of the battle played out in the papers in the United States. Equally interestingly, he apparently shrank from publishing this account before his death (it was suppressed until it recently appeared in his posthumously published Autobiography), even though he had published a jeremiad against King Leopold's crimes in the Congo the previous year.

Perhaps the one lasting consequence of the massacre in the U.S. was that it shadowed Wood's subsequent career and is one reason why, despite
the aggressive support of his patron, Theodore Roosevelt, we didn't get
President Leonard Wood.

Although the Moro Wars were considered over by 1913, continual unrest plagued the region through the US colonial period, the Japanese occupation, and independence.

Then, in 1969, dozens of Moro soldiers in the Armed Forces of the Philippines were killed at a base on Corregidor in the Jabidah Massacre, an incident that has been successfully hushed up to the point nobody knows what happened.

But the best guess is that problems arose with a group of ethnic-Moro soldiers organized by the Philippine government to try and detach Sabah Province in Malaysia (a part of the Sultan of Sulu's domain that had ended up under Malaysian rule at decolonization) for incorporation in the Philippines.

If truth be told,
Mindanao looks more like Malaysia than the Philippines, especially the
Malaysian province of Sabah across the strait. “Bangsamoro”, the term
used by Muslim autonomy/independence advocates, means “Moro people”. “Bangsa”
is a Malay term.

In fact, there’s always a “Malaysia
annex Mindanao” “Philippines annex Sabah” “Independence for Mindanao/Sabah”
buzz going on, though the current Philippine government has apparently set its Sabah ambitions aside.

Even the Sultanate of Sulu is trying for a comeback:

Nobody was prosecuted, no explanations were made, and the Philippine/Christian brutality and impunity toward Moro Muslims exhibited by the Jabidah Massacre is acknowledged as a key factor in the emergence of the modern Moro insurgency.

Interestingly, “Moro” is a synthetic ethnicity of relatively recent vintage.

When the Spanish set up their
colony in the Philippines, they gave the name Moor to their opponents who
resisted conversion to Catholicism, not because they were dusky but because
they were Muslim, like the North African Arabs the Spanish armies had just
defeated on the Iberian peninsula.

Here's a map showing the distribution of Muslim peoples in Mindanao about the time the U.S. took over in 1900.

"Moro" appears to be one of the modern ethnic identities that is evoked and strengthened by
government oppression of stateless polities in a dynamic similar to that of the Uyghurs, Tibetans,
Balochs, and the Kurds.

Another key factor, though one that doesn't seem to get bruited about very much, was the support of Muammar Gaddafi for the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

With that context, let's take another look at Rodrigo Duterte.

Duterte is not native to Mindanao. His family comes from a central Philippine island group, the Visayan Islands. Christians from Visayan Islands and other regions were settled in Mindanao by the U.S. and Philippine governments as part of a strategy to demographically submerge the Moro, distribute prime land and resources to settlers and corporations, and economically and politically marginalize the Moro and criminalize their resistance in a manner that will be familiar to observers of tactics in Tibet, Xinjiang, and Palestine.

It appears to have been successful to the point that Moros are perhaps 17% of the population of Mindanao today, down from 90% in 1900.

A 2015 news
article/puff piece provides a useful perspective on Dutarte and his
attention to the Mindanao/security issue beyond the usual “murderous buffoon” framing. I'm quoting it at great length because I don't think you'll see a lot of this perspective in the Western press:

As the leader of a city which had
its painful share of violence and terrorism believed perpetrated by Islamic
extremists where 45 people were killed in three bombing incidents in 1993 and
2003, Davao City Mayor Rody Duterte still remains hopeful that a negotiated
settlement would end the conflict in the Southern Philippines which has dragged
on for generations.

"If there is anybody who wishes
that this bloody problem would end soon, it is I because I am both Moro and
Christian," Duterte said.

"I feel the fear of the
Christians and share the dreams of the Moro people who feel that they have been
dispossessed of their land and identity," the City Mayor said.

Duterte admits publicly for the
first time that his maternal grandmother had a Moro lineage.

"There is a part of me which is
Moro," he said.

Duterte's ties with the Muslims of
the South were made even stronger because his eldest son, Paolo who is now Vice
Mayor of the City, embraced Islam when he married a Muslim Tausug girl.

"I have grandchildren who are
either Muslim or Christian. Would I want to see a situation in the future where
even my own grandchildren would be dragged into this conflict?," he asked.

…

Following the bombings, the national
government approved the city's recommendation to organize Task Force Davao, a
military composite group which established check points all over the city to
control the entry of bombs and guns.

When Duterte ordered that the City
will no longer allow the entry of powerful firearms usually brought in by
bodyguards of politicians mostly Muslims from the Cotabato and Maguindanao
provinces, everybody followed.

"This city is open to everybody
regardless of tribe or religion for as long as you abide by the law,"
Duterte once declared when the issue of the presence in the city of members of
the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front
(MILF) was raised.

MNLF Chairman Nur Misuari has a wife
who lives in Davao City.

Top ranking officials of the MILF
are also believed to have homes in Davao City where their children live while
studying in colleges and universities in the city.

Davao has thus become a model
"peace city" today where members of warring groups - the Moro rebels,
the New People's Army (NPA), policemen and soldiers - live and abide by the
strict rules of the city under the leadership of Rody Duterte.

It was also chosen as one of the
Safest Cities in the World to Live In.

Muslim businessmen, mostly Maranaos,
swear that they are never harassed in Davao City while selling their wares,
unlike elsewhere in the country where they are the favorite prey of corrupt
policemen who mulct them of their little earnings.

But Duterte's dream of peace
transcends the boundaries of his city.

"For as long as the
misunderstanding between government and the Moro groups continue, we will
always be unstable," he said.

Duterte is aware that the problem is
not simple.

He says the Moro people are largely
misunderstood because they embrace a religion which is not known to many
Filipinos in other parts of the country.

Feeling that they do not belong to
the mainly Christian Filipino society and that they were never given much
importance by the Central Government in its national policy formulation and
decision making, the Muslims of the South have always struggled for
independence and self determination.

"The danger here is that unless
these legitimate issues are addressed, there is the grim scenario of the
younger Moros gravitating towards radical Islamic organizations," Duterte
said.

"I will be the last person who
will agree to the dismemberment of this nation," he once declared.

Duterte maintains that while he
understands the resentment of the Bangsamoro to being called Filipinos based on
the belief that it is a Spanish imposed name, he believes that Christians and
Muslims in this country belong to one race.

"We can call ourselves by any
other name but the fact that we are brothers will always remain," he said.

…

He said that while the Philippine peace
negotiators have the noble intention of forging peace with the MILF in the
Southern Philippines, they failed to consider some cultural realities involving
the Moro tribes of the South.

"The Moros of the islands are
distinct culturally from the Maguindanaos, Maranaos and Iranuns of mainland
Mindanao. Offering a generic solution to their peculiar problems and concerns
may not work at all," Duterte explained.

The Tausugs will never be
comfortable being under the leadership of the Maguindanaos or Maranaos, a
situation which is also true inversely, Duterte explained adding that this
could be the reason behind the failure of the Autonomous Region in Muslim
Mindanao (ARMM) which was first headed by Misuari.

Duterte also said that while he
hopes that the proposed Bangsamoro Basic Law (BBL) will pass Congress, his
lawyer's instincts tell him that the measure will be questioned before the
Supreme Court because of some Constitutional infirmities.

It will be difficult to reconcile a
parliamentary autonomous government with a Presidential central government, he
said.

Duterte, a San Beda law graduate,
said there must be a back up plan should the BBL fail to pass the
Constitutionality test.

"We cannot afford to fail
here," adding that Federalism and a two Federal States set up for the
South could prove to be the best solutions.

A Federal Parliamentary form of
government in the Philippines would not only serve the interests of the
neglected regions of the country but also accommodate the desires of the Bangsamoro
of the South.

A Federal State for the
Maguindanaos, Maranaos, Iranuns and other Moro tribes of the main island and
another Federal State for the Tausugs, Sama, Yakan and other island tribes
could address the cultural issues.

Duterte said that what happened in
the past could not be undone but that there is a need for national
reconciliation.

"All that we could do to our
Muslim brothers and sisters now is to give them what is due them which includes
respecting their unique identity and respecting their claim to what is
rightfully theirs,' he said.

Concerning the Moro disdain for
the term “Filipino”, I have to say I did find it odd that an Asian nation decided
to keep King Philip II of Spain as its namesake, but I guess naming America
after some Italian sailor is just as weird.

All in all, a thoughtful perspective on coexistence and reconciliation in a difficult and complicated neighborhood--made more difficult and complicated by a century of massacre and meddling by the US and Manila-- that Duterte has been governing for a couple decades with considerable success.

How 'bout that.

Having said that, I would not take that “Safest City
in the World” designation to the bank. Apparently an on-line poll was successfully freep'd with 800 responses.

By now, it should be clear that there's more to the Philippines than Manila, more to its politics and society than upper class Catholicism, and more to its security concerns than partnering with the United States to push back against the PRC in the South China Sea.

There's Mindanao, there's Moros, there's separatism, there's issues of justice that have been papered over by the Manila establishment to present a neat neo-liberal narrative that complements the US pivot to Asia.

13 comments:

Just 1.4 million dead? For consistencies sake, the same rules that are applied to the number that Stalin killed should be applied to all other mass killings, so that gives a death toll of about 90 million for the United States' imperialist adventure in the Philippines.

After leaving the tongue-in-cheek comment above, I went over to read the food pages at the Washington Post where they suggested some recipes for upcoming "Cuban Independence Day". Further investigation revealed that this isn't Cuba's Independence Day (October 10 - day in 1868, when Carlos Manuel de Céspedes gave freedom to his slaves and started the independence war against the Spanish colonial power) but a "celebration" of the day on which Cuba became a vassal/neo-colony of the United States (May 20th, 1902).